The European Commission recently published its long-awaited draft legislation on invasive alien species (1). The proposed regulation implements a key target of the European Union Biodiversity Strategy (2), aiming to bring EU policy in line with the Convention on Biological Diversity targets for 2020, which obliges signatories to identify and prioritize invasive alien species and their pathways ...

The invasion of ecosystems by exotic species is currently viewed as one of the most important sources of biodiversity loss. The largest part of this loss occurs on islands, where indigenous species have often evolved in the absence of strong competition, herbivory, parasitism or predation. As a result, introduced species thrive in those optimal insular ecosystems affecting their plant food, com...

Soil nitrogen and phosphorus are commonly limiting elements affecting plant species richness in temperate zones. Our species richness-ecological study was performed in alder-dominated forests representing temperate floodplains (streamside alder forests of Alnion incanae alliance) and swamp forests (alder carrs of Alnion glutinosae alliance) in the Western Carpathians. Species richness (i.e., th...

Trait-based approaches are widely used in community ecology and invasion biology to unravel underlying mechanisms of vegetation dynamics. Although fundamental trade-offs between specific traits and invasibility are well described among terrestrial plants, little is known about their role and function in aquatic plant species. In this study, we examine the functional differences of aquatic alien...

Despite intensive research during the past decade on the effects of alien species, invasion science still lacks the capacity to accurately predict the impacts of those species and, therefore, to provide timely advice to managers on where limited resources should be allocated. This capacity has been limited partly by the context-dependent nature of ecological impacts, research highly skewed towa...

A good understanding of the mechanisms and magnitude of the impact of invasive alien species on ecosystem services and biodiversity is a prerequisite for the efficient prioritisation of actions to prevent new invasions or for developing mitigation measures. In this review, we identified alien marine species that have a high impact on ecosystem services and biodiversity in European seas, classif...

Although invasive alien species have been identified as the second greatest threat to biodiversity after habitat loss, characterizing and quantifying their impacts on native species and habitats remains a fundamental problem in conservation biology. Here, I review the techniques that are currently used to assess the impact of invasive alien species on biodiversity, highlighting both their uses ...

Exclosure studies have been used to great advantage in the Hawaiian Islands to evaluate and demonstrate impacts of alien vertebrate herbivores upon native vegetation. Information presented for 50 exclosures, mostly on Hawaii and Maui, shows a wide range of vegetation responses. In most situations, native biota hold their own or increase following removal of vertebrate damage, but the chance of ...

Although research on human-mediated exchanges of species has substantially intensified during the last centuries, we know surprisingly little about temporal dynamics of alien species accumulations across regions and taxa. Using a novel database of 45,813 first records of 16,926 established alien species, we show that the annual rate of first records worldwide has increased during the last 200 y...

     Roads have an important role in plants dispersal on different scales. Various plant species settle on roadsides, but some of them can enter the natural environments and threaten their biodiversity. Worldwide knowledge of roadside flora is necessary for local and global management of natural areas. Accordingly, the roadside flora of Northern Khorasan rangelands was studied along the 600 km ...